Cannot add,edit or delete files on Desktop

There could be several causes for this. Are you running out of disk space? If very little free space remains you may see this behavior. It may also occur if you have an excessively large number of icons on your desktop.

If you are confident that a comfortable amount of free space remains - at least several gigabytes - repair the disk:

1. Boot Lion Recovery by restarting the computer while holding the Command ⌘ and R keys.
2. From the Utilities menu, select Disk Utility, select your hard disk from the left column and click "Repair" near the lower right.

Then, quit Disk Utility and reset your home folder permissions:

1. Select Utilities from the menu, then click Terminal.
2. In the Terminal window, type resetpassword and press Return.
3. The password reset utility window will appear. Do not select a new password. Instead, click the icon for your Mac's hard disk at the top. From the dropdown below it, select your user account.
4. At the bottom of the window, you will see Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs. Click the Reset button.

The reset process may take a couple of minutes. When it finishes quit the programs and restart your Mac.

See if that works.

Try booting in "safe mode". Read about it first: Mac OS X: What is Safe Boot, Safe Mode?

Any difference?

Thanks. Now try creating another, temporary user account as in the following

Creating a temporary user to isolate user-specific problems: Isolating an issue by using another user account

Read about this troubleshooting technique in that article first. Scroll down to the heading "How to troubleshoot OS X user accounts" to determine how to create, test, and then delete the temporary account.

Any difference using the temporary account?

OK, thanks. Delete the temporary account.

You may have one or more items in your /Library/StartupItems folder or in /System/Library/StartupItems that is causing this. If either of those folders contain anything at all, report what it is.

You may also have a non-Apple kernel extension that may be the cause of this as well. In your Utilities folder, find Terminal and open it. At the prompt, type

kextstat

There will be many results. Look for anything that does not begin with com.apple.

Report anything you find with a name that begins with something other than that.

Thanks. You installed a utility called wireshark. I am not familiar with it but from what little I read, it appears to modify permissions, so it is capable of causing this problem. I also learned that it is not entirely compatible with Lion.

If wireshark has an uninstaller use it, and be sure to find all occurrences of ChmodBPF and delete them.

The program may also conflict with Soundflower. Removing one or the other may solve the problem.

There is no problems from ChmodBPF. All it does is chmod g+rw /dev/bpf* to correct the permissions on that "device". I've have that installed. And by the way, Jaksta installs the exact same StartupItem because I think it needs to do packet capture too. A bit redundant to have both do it but no harm done.

Soundflower I've seen in other reports and don't suspect it either.

On the other hand, that com.avatron.AVEx* stuff I am not sure about. So it could be a possible suspect.

Since it was stated that there are no problems when booted in safe mode then there are other places to look for suspects besides StartupItems. Specifically,

your login items

~/Library/LaunchAgents (in your home directory)

/Library/LaunchAgents

/Library/LaunchDaemons

And for the sake of completeness, there's any third party kexts. In terminal (in Utilities) copy/paste the following line:

kextstat -kl | awk ' !/apple/ { print $6 $7 } '

Hit return to get its output and post it along with the files from the other places I listed.

apple_man_007 wrote:

I deleted wireshark & the ChmodBPF folder in /Library/StartupItems.

At first the problem still existed. But it now seems to be working fine.....

Thanks for you help!

I can pretty much guarantee you that did not fix your problem. Time will tell.